


an open longing, a hollow hearth

by Dialux



Series: words for the lost, the captive beautiful, the wives, those less fortunate than we [6]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: BAMF Women, Character Study, Feminist Themes, Gen, Underlying Unceasing Unbearable Rage At The Way Of The World
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-11
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-18 05:41:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29978208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dialux/pseuds/Dialux
Summary: “Wish freedom for me, if you must offer me something,” says Aredhel, and rises, ignoring the blood staining her gown and the pain. “But not love, and certainly not duty!”[Aredhel travels to Beleriand, to Gondolin, to Nan Dungortheb, and back; but she never quite finds what she wants. Somehow, she learns to live with it.]
Relationships: Anairë & Aredhel (Tolkien), Aredhel & Turgon of Gondolin, Aredhel/Eöl (Tolkien)
Series: words for the lost, the captive beautiful, the wives, those less fortunate than we [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2101053
Comments: 10
Kudos: 28





	an open longing, a hollow hearth

**Author's Note:**

> Aredhel's story is about as much of a tragedy as it gets. Like, NO catharsis whatsoever. It sucks.

It is not a dream, whatever they say afterwards.

...

She is born at the stroke of midnight, on the hottest day of the year. Anaire sweats and curses through the last week of her pregnancy. Fingolfin claims to have hauled blocks of ice down the Calacirya for his wife’s comfort, balanced on his broad shoulders.

But none of it matters, because the moment that little Aredhel, blood-slicked and howling, slips from her mother’s body, lightning flashes, thunder claps, and the heavens open up around her.

...

She is born in rain. She is born into a tempest that shatters trees and warps stone. She is born into the kind of elemental fury that cannot be taught, only experienced.

...

“There is not only joy to be had in life,” says her mother, once, tending to cuts on Aredhel’s back that were carved by a bear that Aredhel had attacked, armed with nothing more than a knife and her own courage. “There is duty as well, my little girl. Duty and kindness and love.”

Aredhel laughs instead of screaming. “The day I find love shall be the day of my death.”

“Do not say that!”

“I have seen it.”

_“Aredhel!”_

“Wish freedom for me, if you must offer me something,” says Aredhel, and rises, ignoring the blood staining her gown and the pain. “But not love, and certainly not duty!”

...

The gown had been white before it was ruined. Aredhel washes it in her own bathroom, scrubs and scrubs until her blood and the bear’s blood finally fade, until the sun has bleached the stains to nothingness.

Then she wears it again, braids her hair out of the way, and stalks into the forest.

She doesn’t return until she has tamed the bear into friendship.

...

Forever after, she wears white.

...

It is a reminder: life is a stain. It might begin clean, but it shall never end that way. The only thing to do is to wash it out, and to scrub until one’s arms ache, and to let the cloth dry out before being stained once more. 

Aredhel learns many, many tricks to removing the stains.

...

 _I will have vengeance, or I shall have death,_ Feanor had snarled in the courtyard of Tirion. 

Anaire does not ask any of her sons to remain. She does not even speak to Fingolfin. But she is in Aredhel’s rooms when she returns, sitting in the silent darkness. 

“Do not go,” she whispers.

Aredhel remembers bears and blood and bitterness on her tongue. Her life in Aman has been a cage, glittering and golden, and if the world outside it shall be dangerous- well, she has a knife, and her own rage, and the knowledge to scrub out stains. 

“Do not try to stop me.”

“Have you no _love_ for a mother?”

“I will have freedom,” says Aredhel levelly, and watches her mother’s face crumple, and refuses to feel guilty for it. “I will have freedom, or I shall have death.”

...

(She does not tell that story to her father. The one time he asks- they all know where Anaire was, that last night in Tirion- Aredhel looks at him, steadily, until he turns away.)

...

There are unforgivable things. Those boats- well, Aredhel has never been a forgiving person, and she does not wish to become one now.

...

There are immense storms on the Helcaraxe. Aredhel hears, sometimes, Lalwen laughing so loud it sounds like a scream. She does not weep: she has not wept for many, many years. Even as her people- those she trusted, those who trusted her- fall like flies, Aredhel does not falter.

The tears would freeze on her face, and she has no time to brush it off.

...

When Elenwe dies, Aredhel allows her brother one night to mourn. She holds little Idril in her arms, soothing the shudders away, and doesn’t release her to anyone else. Her brothers are with Turgon; her father is tending to their people. What Idril needs is someone who remembers her. 

The next morning, Aredhel wakes Idril, and she brushes the little girl’s hair out until it shines, casting more wood than strictly necessary to ensure it doesn’t freeze. Aredhel’s fingers are not nimble enough for the proper braids, but she manages a reasonable enough facsimile for her niece.

Then she takes her to Turgon’s tent.

“Get up,” she says coldly. 

Argon is curled around Turgon, trying to keep him from fading through sheer force of will. He sits up when he sees Aredhel, eyes wide, and she bares her teeth.

“Get him up,” she says flatly.

“I don’t think that’s...”

“Get out, then,” says Aredhel, and doesn’t watch him scuttle out. Argon will bring someone- either Fingon, or her father- and all that means is that she doesn’t have too much time. She glances down at Idril. “Watch.”

It is four steps from the entrance of the tent to the bed. Aredhel takes the steel knife she once used to attack a bear with- the knife she’d left deliberately exposed to the elements- and places the flat very cleanly against Turgon’s throat. 

Turgon jerks at the chill. Aredhel goes with him, fluid as water, so she doesn’t cut his throat but keeps the knife against his skin.

He is stronger than her. Aredhel lets him finally throw her off- though it takes longer than she’d expected- and waits, because Turgon’s thrashing has finally led him to catch sight of his daughter, his little daughter with her braids done in the Vanya style, looking like the miniature of her mother. The grief in his eyes is simply awful.

Aredhel waits.

And when he finally draws himself around Idril, sobbing but not the terrible, bone-chilling silence of an elf on the verge of fading, Aredhel leaves.

...

“You cannot save anyone,” Aredhel tells Idril, when Turgon finally allows her out of his sight. “But you can offer them a path back. Whether they take it or not is their choice.”

“The Burners,” says Idril, then- that’s what she calls the Feanorians, precocious child that she is- “will you give them a path back, then?”

Aredhel had loved Celegorm, and Curufin, and the twins, too. But she is not a forgiving person.

“If someone burns their bridges,” she says finally, “you do not owe them more tinder.”

...

(That is a lie.)

...

It is not that she is unforgiving. 

It is that she does not wish to be forgiving.

...

When Fingon saves Maedhros, Aredhel visits the healer’s tent in the dead of night. She watches the agony of her cousin’s hroa, etched into his skin, and she does not feel triumph. 

If she sees Celegorm again, she will fall into his arms, and she will forgive him everything.

But Argon is dead, and so is Elenwe, and so had they all come through the ice, embittered and betrayed. It is not that Aredhel does not want to forgive her cousins; it is that she fears what will happen if she does. She cannot spend her life waiting for a knife in the back.

Turgon wants nothing to do with them.

Fingon will not leave them behind.

And Aredhel does not wish to see another brother dead. She kisses Fingon, and she kisses Fingolfin, and she kisses Finrod and all his siblings, and then she disappears into the night with Turgon, having not spoken to any of her Feanorian cousins since before the Helcaraxe.

...

“Freedom is not a dream,” she tells her mother, once. “I don’t _want_ it. I need it.”

“If what you wish for is total freedom,” Anaire had replied, “you will never have it.”

Aredhel thinks about her mother, who had loved to dance but been forbidden from it by her grandfather; she thinks about how beautifully Anaire dances in the privacy of their home. She thinks about the way Anaire has chained herself down to the thunder and fury of the House of Finwe, and she laughs.

“You would say that,” Aredhel tells her.

...

She builds Gondolin and she leaves Gondolin and she returns to Gondolin.

The day she finds love- the day she knows she finds love- is when she takes a spear meant for her son. It all cracks open and bleeds away, all the rage seething beneath her breastbone, all the fury she’s spent centuries tending to, all the anger that she’s never known the beginning or ending of, and Aredhel is _burning_ with it, blazing, bright as the father who would soon ride to his death and the brother who would collapse under betrayal and the gods she’d once rejected.

She dies from it, of course, but Aredhel has never feared flame.

…

She is set free upon the river, her corpse dressed in the hands of the niece that she’d once cradled so tightly, her hair braided by the brother she chose to follow. To her son she has given her hairclasps; to Idril she has given the knife that once saved Turgon from fading.

(They say steam rose from her body, so great it enveloped all of Gondolin in a great fog for weeks to come.)

...

That knife saves Idril and Earendil from Maeglin, atop the wind-battered tower of Gondolin, when Morgoth finally attacks.

...

Later- years later- Ages later- Aredhel falls into her mother’s arms once more. She is a mother now herself, and she has watched and walked beside and touched and loved dark things, and she is not the girl who’d walked into a forest to conquer her fear with not even a knife to defend herself. She was born in rain and died in a river, a High Lady of the Noldor. She was not felled by Morgoth.

She is the first of her family to be reborn.

“Was it worth it?” asks Anaire, once and only once. “Your dreams of freedom- was any of it worth it?”

Aredhel tosses her hair, bares her teeth.

Smiles.

“It was,” she says, “necessary.”


End file.
